What is the best way to take contiguous features and separate them for clarity in a Layout? This would have to be done for the base layer and all subsequent layers.

Mapping Center Answer:

I think you are going to have to do this by hand…unfortunately. There is no automatic way to "explode" the features. Using cartographic representations, you can shuffle the features apart graphically while still maintaining their true positions in the database, but you still have to do the shuffling by hand. The advantange of taking this approach is that the labels will be applied to the modified geometry.